In addition to your Star Trek Beyonds and Independence Day: Resurgences, 2016 also promises some more unexpected, under-the-radar sci-fi offerings. Like Synchronicity, a new time-travel noir thriller from writer-director Jacob Gentry (of 2007’s The Signal).

The twisty plot centers on a physicist named Jim Beale (Chad McKnight), whose new invention is able to fold the space and time to create wormholes. Things start to get weird when a mysterious dahlia flower appears out of nowhere, and he discovers that the woman he’s just started flirting with, Abby (Brianne Davis), might not be exactly who she says she is.

Michael Ironside plays a venture capitalist who’s interested in Jim’s device, and AJ Bowen and Scott Poythress play Jim’s scientist pals. Watch the Synchronicity trailer after the jump.Read More »

Jacob Gentry has been making movies for a long time; he made his first feature almost ten years ago, and hit the Sundance jackpot as one of the creators of The Signal in 2007. Earlier this fall we featured Gentry’s two-part short film / music video — both parts embedded below –for the forthcoming Broken Bells album ‘After the Disco.’ (The album arrives in early January.)

The short features Anton Yelchin and Kate Mara as a couple who find one another through a sort of science fiction dreamscape. Together with the performances, Gentry uses great visuals and Broken Bells’ cinema-ready music to create a vision where dreamers can get lost in their own desires.

I sat down with Gentry in LA not long ago to talk about the process of creating the video, and we ended up talking a lot about core concepts of directing. I always love hearing how a small project comes together to be more than the sum of its parts, but it was Gentry’s talk about the actual craft of directing that I think are really great for other young directors to read. Read More »

The band Broken Bells, aka Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton and James “the Shins” Mercer, makes very cinematic music. For a video to accompany new material the pair had a great idea. Burton took a story concept to Jacob Gentry (The Signal, My Super Psycho Sweet 16) and gave him the freedom to make an extended pair of shorts that effectively act as a music video for the album, rather than for any one song. (Gentry had previously done an earlier video for the band.)

The result is a two-part sci-fi romance starring Kate Mara (House of Cards) and Anton Yelchin (Star Trek, Only Lovers Left Alive), which uses music from the Broken Bells record ‘After the Disco,’ along with some material that is exclusive to these videos, as the score for the whole story. There are some classic sci-fi influences here, a nice little twist, and an emotionally affecting arc to it all. Check out both parts below. Read More »

Bloody Disgusting has an exclusive one-on-one interview with Jacob Gentry, one of the three directors of The Signal. Jacob described the movie as a “low budget-punk rock-scifi-horror-suspense-thriller-love story about the evil monster inside us all that is brought out when the media around us is exaggerated to the point of critical mass.” Real Synopsis: A mysterious signal is being transmitted from all media devices in the city of Terminus, provoking murder and madness within the psyches of its inhabitants.

Last year tickets to the opening night gala ended up selling for over $5,000 on ebay. Well not this year, Sundance officials warn that tickets resold online can be remotely deactivated before the film’s showing. This is a great move by Sundance, but call me just a little skeptical. How will Sundance be able to determine what ticket to deactivate? By the ebay seller’s name? What if they sell it from a friend’s account?